Category Archives: Space Station

Hamid Ansari talks on the phone with his wife, Anousheh Ansari, during her first moments onboard the International Space Station, on September 20, 2006 in Korolev Russia. Ansari and the Expedition 14 crew docked to the International Space Station September 20, 2006. A Soyuz TMA-9 spacecraft lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan September 18, 2006. Photo by Bill Ingalls/NASA/Getty Images

Russia officials say they will resume space tourism in 2018 after years of sending into space only professional cosmonauts and astronauts.

Russia had sent seven paying guests to the International Space Station since 2001 before curtailing the program in 2009. Sending a tourist has been all but impossible since 2011 when the United States shut down its Space Shuttle program and had to rely on Russian Soyuz rockets in order to get into orbit.

Russia, however, has made an exception for British soprano Sarah Brightman who is due to blast off on Sept. 1.

American enterprises aimed at space tourism were stymied last fall after a Virgin Galactic craft crashed during a test flight over the Mojave desert. The SpaceShipTwo crash, on Oct. 31, 2014, killed one pilot and left another injured. It also slowed Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson's plans of getting paying customers to the edges of space, for $250,000 a pop.

Virgin Galactic CEO said soon after the incident that the company could resume test flights this summer.

Russia's RKK Energia, a state-controlled rocket manufacturer, said in a quarterly report released on Tuesday that it plans to make up for an expected drop in demand for manned flights by resuming space tourism in 2018.

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Russia to resume space tourism in 2018

What #39;s The Odds? ISS Shut Off Live Feed, Then Passes Right Through The Eclipse
http://www.undergroundworldnews.com What are the odds? Yesterday, March 20th, just as the Moon was passing in front of the Sun, producing a deep solar eclipse over Europe, the International...

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What's The Odds? ISS Shut Off Live Feed, Then Passes Right Through The Eclipse - Video

Andromeda Season 5 Episode 9 Andromeda Full Episodes Andromeda Ful Season
Andromeda Season 1 Episode 3 - To Loose the Fateful Lightning The crew find an old Highguard Space Station inhabited by the teen aged decedents of the original crew. The want to rebuild the......

By: Jaco Mings

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Andromeda Season 5 Episode 9 Andromeda Full Episodes Andromeda Ful Season - Video

Mega Construction Space Edition: episode 2
In this episode of mega construction space edition we build some facilities to our space station! Our website: http://seacaps.webs.com Skip to the role play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuBYwYl...

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Mega Construction Space Edition: episode 2 - Video

cigar type ufo rod near space station march 15/16th 2015
ufo rod near space station rod enhanced.

By: Guiseppe Willis

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cigar type ufo rod near space station march 15/16th 2015 - Video

Planet Earth: Flying over North America
Five timelapse videos taken from the International Space Station as it orbits over North America. These sequences were recorded between January 25th and 30th, 2012. "Videos courtesy of...

By: Geralyn Maho

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Planet Earth: Flying over North America - Video

Universe project 72 Space Station - Ep 02
Mise en orbite et manoeuvre diverse pour le module de production solaire et ses multiples stabilisateurs.

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Universe project 72 Space Station - Ep 02 - Video

What's one thing astronaut Scott Kelly can't do without when he moves into space this week for a year? A belt.

Kelly went beltless during his five-month mission at the International Space Station a few years back, and he hated how his shirttails kept floating out of his pants. So this time, the 51-year-old retired Navy captain packed "a military, tactical-style thing" that can hold a tool pouch.

Actually, scratch pouch. He prefers "superhero utility belt."

Kelly's partner on the yearlong stay at the space station Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko can't do without his vitamins. When their Soyuz rocket blasts off from Kazakhstan on Saturday (Friday afternoon in the U.S.), three bottles of over-age-50 vitamins will be on board.

After more than two years of training, Kelly and Kornienko are eager to get going. It will be the longest space mission ever for NASA, and the longest in almost two decades for the Russian Space Agency, which holds the record at 14 months.

Medicine and technology have made huge leaps since then, and the world's space agencies need to know how the body adapts to an entire year of weightlessness before committing to even longer Mars expeditions. More yearlong missions are planned, with an ultimate goal of 12 test subjects. The typical station stint is six months.

"We know a lot about six months. But we know almost nothing about what happens between six and 12 months in space," said NASA's space station program scientist, Julie Robinson.

Among the more common space afflictions: weakened bones and muscles, and impaired vision and immune system. Then there is the psychological toll.

Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, a frequent flier who will accompany Kelly and Kornienko into orbit, predicts it will be the psychological not physical effects that will be toughest on the one-year crew.

"Being far away from Earth, being sort of crammed, having few people to interact with," Padalka said. He'll break the record for most time spent in space during his six-month stay, closing in on a grand total of 900 days by the time he returns to Earth in September.

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What to Pack for Year in Space? A 'Superhero Utility Belt'

TIME Science space Russia Gives Space Station Crew the Keys to Its Ship Philip Scott Andrews for TIME Members of the press and officials from NASA and Roscosmos talk with Russian Cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka, alongside NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly, after a training session at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, March 23, 2015. The official handover of a brand new Soyuz is a milestone for any space flight from Baikonur

No one kept a secret like the old Soviet space program kept a secret. Back in the early days of the space race, Sergei Korolev, the Soviets chief designer, was known only as, well, the Chief Designer, the better to prevent any assassination attempts that officials from Roscosmosthe Russian NASAconvinced themselves the Americans were cooking up. Baikonur, the Russian Cape Canaveral, hidden away in the Kazakh steppes, stole its name from a mining town 200 miles north, the better to confuse enemies who might come looking for it.

But the secrecy of Baikonur was partly just geography. If you want to get to space you need launch pads that aim away from populated areas and that are located as close to the equator as possible, giving your rockets a boost in speed thanks to the physics of Earths rotation. In the U.S. that meant Florida, with millions of people to the west and north but no one at all in the ocean to the east. In Russia, that meant Baikonur.

The Baikonur launch facilitywhere cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka and astronaut Scott Kelly will lift off for the International Space Station on March 28, with Kelly and Kornienko slated to stay a full yearis a half hour drive into the desert outside of Baikonur proper, which is itself is at least three hours away from pretty much anything at all. The old spaceport, when you finally arrive, looks exactly like you would have expected it to look if you grew up during the cold war when everything Soviet was synonymous with scary.

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There are the cement blockhouses and the skeletal gantries and the security fences everywhere, all growing out of the surrounding scrub without so much as a single sapling or tuft of grass to add a little green. You could photograph the place in color, but why bother?

But inside Baikonur, none of that matters. Here, the sense of placeor placelessness, reallyfalls away, replaced by the same kind of closed-world, finely focused, center-of-the-universe bustle that accompanies any launch facility anywhere on the planet.

On Monday, at T-minus five days, the three members of the prime crew and the three members of the backup crew were scheduled to run their final ingress drills, climbing into their Soyuz spacecraft, for the first timeor at least the first official time. That, according to more than half a century of custom, required an equally official handoff, in which the people who built the spacecraft would, in effect, turn the keys over to the people who would drive it.

The ceremony took place in a large meeting room divided by a glass partition. Representatives from NASA, Roscosmos and the media crowded on one side of the glass and waited until officials from both Roscosmos and Energiya, the state-owned contractor that built the rocket and the spacecraft, entered and sat at a conference table facing the partition. The cosmonauts and astronauts, now in preflight medical quarantine, entered through a door on the other side, and sat at a matching conference table facing the officials.

The spacecraft is now ready for you, one of the government men said to the crew in Russian. It is ready or flight.

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Russia Gives Space Station Crew the Keys to Its Ship

NASA and Bigelow Aerospace are preparing to launch an expandable habitat module to the International Space Station this year. The agency joined Bigelow Thursday at its Las Vegas facility to mark completion of the companys major milestones.

The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, leverages key innovations in lightweight and compact materials, departing from a traditional rigid metallic structure. In its packed configuration aboard SpaceXs Dragon spacecraft launched on a Falcon 9 rocket, the module will measure approximately 8 feet in diameter. Once attached to the space stations Tranquility Node and after undergoing a series of hardware validations, the module will be deployed, resulting in an additional 565 cubic feet of volume about the size of a large family camping tent accessible by astronauts aboard the orbiting laboratory.

Expandable habitats could be a new way to dramatically increase the amount of volume available to astronauts while also enhancing protection against radiation and physical debris. Innovative advances in efficiency provided by expandable habitats may give the nation new options for extending human presence farther into the solar system, both in transit and on the surface of other worlds, while also supporting the development of innovative platforms for commercial use in low-Earth orbit.

In the next decade, NASA plans to extend human spaceflight from low-Earth orbit operations to proving ground operations in cis-lunar space orbiting the moon. In the proving ground, NASA and its partners will validate vital hardware, including deep space habitats, as well as operations and capabilities necessary to send humans on long-duration missions to Mars or other deep-space destinations in which they must operate independently from Earth. The International Space Station serves as the world's leading laboratory for conducting cutting-edge research and is the primary platform for technology development and testing in space to enable human and robotic exploration of destinations beyond low-Earth orbit, including Mars.

Were fortunate to have the space station to demonstrate potential habitation capabilities like BEAM, said Jason Crusan, director of Advanced Exploration Systems at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Station provides us with a long-duration microgravity platform with constant crew access to evaluate systems and technologies we are considering for future missions farther into deep space.

Once BEAM is attached to the Tranquility Node, the space station crew will perform initial systems checks before deploying the habitat. During the BEAMs minimum two-year test period, crews will routinely enter to take measurements and monitor its performance to help inform designs for future habitat systems. Learning how an expandable habitat performs in the thermal environment of space and how it reacts to radiation, micrometeroids, and orbital debris will provide information to address key concerns about living in the harsh environment of space.

The BEAM is an example of NASAs increased commitment to partnering with industry to enable the growth of the commercial use of space. Bigelow Aerospace is building on technology NASA conceived in the 1990s and licensed to the company. NASA and Bigelow Aerospace are each benefitting from the sharing of expertise, costs, and risks to pursue mutual goals.

The module is scheduled to launch on SpaceXs eighth cargo resupply mission to the space station later this year.

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New Expandable Habitat To Launch To ISS This Year